Introduction

Hi everybody! My name is Yaroslav Primachenko and I'd like to tell about the Making Of my work "Aaaa!" (or maybe I've missed one "a" - there's too many of them in the title, too hard to count!). In my spare time I like drawing different freaky characters - it's good for my karma. I also usually do sketches at the meetings at work - you know, especially the boring ones! This character wasn't an exception.

My sleepy, wandering mind created a strange looking guy with whom I totally fell in love (Fig. 01). It was a character living underground, wearing a carrot hat that helps him to attract the attention of rabbits... and don't ask me what he does with the poor fellows after he catches them! The character was so cool that I decided to create it in 3D and try to make an animation (later, after some tests, I decided to give up the animation part in favor of the other project I'm currently working on).

Fig. 01

Sketching and Modeling

I made a quick color sketch to capture the idea of what he would look like. I used Photoshop with some random texture placed on top of the picture and then just moved the hue-saturation sliders until I liked the result. This can be a quick and easy way to colorize a picture, particularly when you want to get the basic idea of the color scheme, but don't want to spend too much time on it (Fig.02).

Fig. 02

I knew from the very beginning that I wasn't going to use references of any existing creatures - they just didn't match my idea of the character - and that was the most challenging and also the most inspiring thing about working on this character. I knew from the concept that it was an underground creature, but I didn't want to make it some black-grey mole guy. Also even though it's an extremely evil character (look at the teeth, or better at the tie - good guys don't wear ties!) I didn't want it to look totally disgusting; it needed to be somehow kind of sweet and lovely (aka Homer Simpson).

I began modeling in 3ds Max, starting from the basic cube and large forms, then cutting, extruding where needed, refining and doing all the staff that you do when making a model - nothing special. I didn't draw any projections or extra sketches - just searched for a character in 3ds Max (Fig.03). If I was making the character today I would probably do it in ZBrush, but when I started this character I didn't know about this fantastic tool yet.